Pu-Li-Ru-La

Released: 1991
Published by: Taito
Genre: Beat-'em-up
Platforms: Arcade, ported to FM Towns Marty, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, PS2

[Note: Sorry for the late update. It was a holiday weekend up here in the frozen tundras.] Well, looks like it's the second week in a row of Taito-developed games! But they do deserve to be in the spotlight, as this week's game Pu-Li-Ru-La is a short but sweet classic weird game. What starts out as a seemingly saccharine fairy tale story turns into a surreal mess (though still admittedly saccharine) in which the two heroes Zac and Mel fight robots, clowns, and angry bamboo shoots to save their homeland of Radishland.

The basic premise behind the game is that each town in Radishland has a key that controls the flow of time, and these keys have been stolen by an evil mastermind, subsequently stopping time. For some reason all sorts of bizarre baddies are roaming around in the frozen towns, and when you kill them they turn into ADORABLE little fuzzy animals that you can, uh, run into to collect points. The combat is pretty simple, Zac and Mel have only one attack (club dudes over the head with a Magic Stick) and can use up to three magic spells per life, which are randomly selected and usually pretty awesome—at one point Mel used a spell that one-hit KO'ed the stage boss and moved us right along to the next level.

If I could have only posted one screenshot to sum up the magic of Pu-Li-Ru-La, this would be it.

While it might sound like a pretty run-of-the-mill sidescrolling beat-'em-up so far, the fun of the game starts in around level three when the world takes a sharp twist for the strange and surreal. Levels are littered with photos of real people blocking the screen or interacting with the characters (for example, a room in which a sideways face on the wall licks your heroes with a giant cartoon tongue). Demonic mosaics replace the storybook towns of the beginning of the game. The game explains in broken English that Radishland is being twisted by a megalomaniac's dreams, and while it's allegedly referring to the final boss, we can probably safely assume it applies to the game designers themselves. It's amazingly fun wondering what sort of monstrosity the next level will hold.

Wait, wait, wait... I don't think this is quite what I signed up for when I started playing this game.

Pu-Li-Ru-La's certainly a bit of an anomaly in the gaming world. It seems, for all intents and purposes, to have been targeted at a pretty young audience, judging from the pastel colours, cutesy characters, and difficulty level—it only takes a handful of credits to beat. And yet, there's something so off about it. It was obviously a pretty successful venture for Taito, as it was ported to four different consoles (!) between 1991 and 1997. It's extremely short, taking probably less than fifteen minutes to beat, but there's just so much to take in that you'll probably find yourself coming back to it. It's a shining example of the really weird arcade games that were coming out in the '90s, perhaps because it's something pretty much anyone with a taste for the offbeat can pick up and enjoy.

Pu-Li-Ru-La gets 4.5/5 nightmare fantasy worlds on the GTPU weird-o-meter. Give it a try, I promise you won't be disappointed. Now if only Taito would get around to making a sequel...